Scholium for the Harvard Alcoholic Club —
"And then there’s the ultimate unknown known:
the 'enlightenment' (satori, kensho) of Zen practice.
If my sense of it from accounts I have read is accurate,
it involves seeing the world and realizing that you always
knew its true nature, but you just didn’t know you knew…
because you were too busy putting it into boxes and
matrices and categories and words. Which reminds us
again that while logical deductions and categorizations
can lead us to discoveries, they can also lead us away
from them."
— James Harbeck on Groundhog Day, 2023
This post was suggested by a Log24 image from All Saints' Day, 2018 —
Related verbiage: Unthought Known.
Mathematics and Narrative, continued…
Out of What Chaos, a novel by Lee Oser—
"This book is more or less what one would expect if Walker Percy wrote about a cynical rock musician who converts to Catholicism, and then Nabokov added some of his verbal pyrotechnics, and then Buster Keaton and the Marquis de Sade and Lionel Trilling inserted a few extra passages. It is a loving and yet appalled description of the underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest. And it is a convincing representation of someone very, very smart."
"If Evelyn Waugh had lived amid the American Northwest rock music scene, he might have written a book like this."
–Anonymous Amazon.com reviewer
A possible source for Oser's title–
"…Lytton Strachey described Pope's theme as 'civilization illumined by animosity; such was the passionate and complicated material from which he wove his patterns of balanced precision and polished clarity.' But out of what chaos did that clarity and precision come!"
—Authors at Work, by Herman W. Liebert and Robert H. Taylor, New York, Grolier Club, 1957, p. 16
Related material:
and the
Midnight in the Garden, Autumn 2009
Review:
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From this journal on the following day, Sept. 21:
Happy birthday, Stephen King.
Today's previous entry is based on a song, "Unthought Known,"
from the above album; the cover of the album uses the 3×3 grid
shown in Sept. 20's midnight review. For related material
on the unconscious, see June 13-15, 2005.
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Who Knows
What Evil Lurks…
The brain-in-a-jar on the cover of the new Pearl Jam album "Backspacer" (previous two entries) is apparently there because of a song on the album, "Unthought Known"–
"All the thoughts you never see
You are always thinking
Brain is wide, the brain is deep
Oh, are you sinking?"
The song title is from a book, The Shadow of the Object (Columbia U. Press, 1987), by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas.
The "unthought known" phrase has been quoted widely by second-rate psychologizers and by some not so second-rate. Their lucubrations suggest that sinking brain-worshippers should seek a…
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